THE INVESTIGATION into the killing in a hotel of Irishman Michael Dwyer by police in Bolivia last April has taken another twist after the appearance of photographs that appear to show one of the men killed alongside Dwyer with the former head of the elite police unit that shot him and Dwyer dead.
Three photos allegedly show Capt Wálter Andrade, a former head of the police’s Utarc (Tactical Crisis Resolution Unit), with Eduardo Rózsa Flores, Dwyer’s companion in Bolivia in the months leading up to his death.
The photos are dated January 2007 and were sent anonymously to the La Razon newspaper, which published them last Tuesday.
Dwyer, Flores and a third man, Arpad Magyarosi, a Romanian who held Hungarian citizenship, were shot dead on the fourth floor of the Hotel Las Americas in the early hours of April 16th. Two other men were arrested.
Authorities say the group planned to assassinate President Evo Morales and were killed after a shoot-out with Utarc officers sent to detain them.
Staff at the hotel told The Irish Times in the days after the killings that there were no signs of a confrontation and that the opposition in Bolivia claims the men were summarily executed as they slept.
In a video recorded in Hungary last year and released after his death, Flores, a Bolivian of Hungarian descent, who also held Croatian citizenship after serving in a Croat militia during the Balkans conflict, said he had been invited to go to Santa Cruz to set up self-defence groups to take on pro-government supporters.
A stronghold of the right-wing opposition, the rich eastern lowland province of Santa Cruz has long sought greater autonomy from the poorer highlands of western Bolivia, where the country’s indigenous majority is concentrated.
In recent years this political confrontation has threatened to escalate into open violence.
Leading elected representatives from the opposition as well as civic leaders in Santa Cruz have been charged with conspiring with Flores by the public prosecutor heading the investigation into the case.
Opposition leaders however say the photographs in La Razon prove that it was the government that was responsible for the presence of Flores in Bolivia.
“This proof is resounding and leaves clear that the government induced through the infiltration of its people the coming to Bolivia of Rózas [Flores] to mount a Roman circus with the approval of ‘Cesar’ Evo Morales,” claimed opposition senator Róger Pinto in a statement to Bolivian media.
The opposition insists that the government has sought to use the presence of Flores in Bolivia to criminalise it ahead of presidential elections in December and that the investigation by prosecutor Marcelo Soza has turned into a political witch-hunt.
On Friday, Mr Soza ruled the La Razon photos inadmissible as evidence and said he would not call Capt Andrade for questioning as “you cannot give credibility to something that appears in an anonymous manner”.
Police sources have told local media that Capt Andrade could have been working undercover in an effort to infiltrate Flores’s group.
Earlier this month, Mr Soza summoned the brother of Santa Cruz’s prefect (a post equivalent to governor) for questioning, saying that documents recovered from the Las Americas hotel linked him to Flores.
Mr Soza has labelled the prefect, Rubén Costas, as a member of the supposed “Supreme Council” of the militia to which Flores had supposedly returned to Bolivia to set up, after years living in Europe.
The mobile phone number of the prefect’s brother, Humberto Costas, was found in a mobile phone recovered from the Las Americas hotel under the name “brother 1”.